Today we continue our look at what is commonly referred to as Cracker fare, the food of the early American settlers of Suwannee County and the rest of Florida.

Coontie, because of its deadly nature if improperly prepared, was soon replaced by other plants, like varieties of corn (including maize). Similar to coontie, maize could be ground into a meal that was used to make breads. Beans were often planted beside corn to allow the bean vines to intertwine with the corn stalks, and squash was planted between them. This arrangement helped to protect all three of the plants. The corn could be used to make many different foods, from today’s well-known cornbread to a coffee-like brew made from blackened corn. Adding a bit of milk and sweetening with sorghum made the drink palatable. Coffee was harder to find, and had to be beaten against a rock or ground in a can.

Beyond what most Americans would call normal plant foods today, there were others that early Suwannee County settlers ate out of necessity. One was the Florida prickly pear, to which those of us who have grown up here are accustomed. The plants were stripped of their needles, boiled, and then turned into an edible mash. The reports are that it was not the most palatable, but it was nutritious; I don’t recall ever being adventurous enough to try it (or maybe I just haven’t found the right cook). The fruit of the cactus does make tasty jelly, however.

Suwannee County’s historical records offer glimpses of other foods that modern citizens might find less appetizing. One common food through the early 1900s was the gopher tortoise, a now-endangered animal. Suwannee Springs, an early tourist attraction, had been used as such since at least 1845. In that year, the Florida Sentinel promised the “very best fare that can be obtained in this section of the country,” and that “beds will be properly attended to and kept clean and airy.” In 1851, Clement Claiborne Clay, son of former Alabama governor Clement Comer Clay, wrote to his wife about comfortable houses holding one hundred visitors that served such delicacies as gopher gumbo.

A book entitled “American Siberia” was written near the close of the Nineteenth Century by J. C. Powell, who decided to write about his experiences as the person in charge of Florida’s convict camps. I urge you to read this book of approximately 400 pages, because the vast majority of it takes place in Suwannee County. One of the interesting stories from “American Siberia” that I have mentioned during presentations, and even put into my historical novel “There Let Me Live and Die,” concerned a prisoner named John Key West. Key West was named after the location where he was convicted. Key West had a healthy appetite for gopher tortoise, which at the time was seen as a type of delicacy (and which probably contributed to its endangerment over the years). “Boiled, fried, stewed, or fricasseed, it was all one to him, and the unfortunate gopher that he encountered in the forest might as well give himself up for lost,” Powell wrote about him.

One day, John Key West had finished his day’s work on the chain gang and was allowed to go to a neighboring hill to look for gopher tortoises. Nothing awry was noticed until the guard collected his prisoners at the end of the day and realized that John Key West was not among them. The guard sent a trusty to look for him. The trusty got to the hill where Key West had said he was going and found nothing but his hat and a trapped gopher tortoise. Upon closer examination, the trusty noticed that some nearby sand was disturbed, so he began digging. It was not long before he unearthed a human foot and ran back to tell the guard.

The guard and his prisoners arrived at the site and recognized the shoe on the foot as belonging to John Key West. They could not pull him out of the dirt, so had to dig with their tools until finally they unearthed the body (a neighbor living nearby refused to give the guard a shovel because he thought it would be used to bury prisoners!). Key West had apparently been so zealous in tracking a gopher tortoise that he had followed it into its hole and dug through until he was buried alive when the tunnel caved in. The most interesting part of the story was that once they pulled John Key West out of the hole, they found clutched in his lifeless hands the second gopher tortoise!

We’ll finish up our look at Cracker food next week.

Eric Musgrove can be reached at ericm@suwgov.org or 386-362-0564.